"Inoculated against what?" you may ask. Inoculated against leftist lunacy! As a proud member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, I am, and perhaps, with time and study, you can be, too.
This blog covers whatever the team members feel like writing about.
My own interests include many areas --- animals, the veterinary profession, the U.S. Navy, conservatism, sourdough baking, computing (Windows and Linux), music, humor, quotations, gas prices, and anything else that catches my attention.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles.

What an old anecdote about Mo Udall in the hospital reveals about McCain's character.

By Michael Lewis

Back in 1996 and 1997, before John McCain was a presidential candidate or object of media fascination, Michael Lewis followed the Arizona senator around as he campaigned for Bob Dole and worked to reform campaign-finance laws. Lewis' pieces for the New Republic and the New York Times Magazine portrayed McCain as a passionate, cantankerous, astonishingly honest political character who frequently acted in ways that brought him no political gain. In the recent back-and-forth over whether McCain is a regular politician or a true outlier, we remembered a wonderful moment from Lewis' 1997 New York Times Magazine profile of McCain, "The Subversive." The passage below comes at the very end of Lewis' article.

Read it and learn about a man who doesn't need to fake good character because he personifies it.

Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who in turn got it from one of his readers.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

In his inimitable style, Mark Steyn explains what's at stake on November 4th in Obama in 2-D. Here's an excerpt:

In his Wednesday-night infomercial, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.” Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why couldn’t he send him a ten-dollar bill and near double the guy’s income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother’s keeper, and his aunt’s keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

You'll definitely want to read the rest of it.

It's too bad that those who would benefit most from the wisdom in Mark Steyn's article are least likely to read it. Instead, if they haven't already Early Voted their way to Obamatopia, they'll eagerly go lemming-like to the polls in two days and give away their birthright.

In a just world, only those who are foolish enough to believe in the false comic-book persona sold to them by Obama the Master Con Man and his enablers would pay the price for their gullibility. In the real world, though, that's not the way it works. Should they succeed in elevating their pseudo-messiah to the White House, we're all going to be learning a painful lesson about reality.

Note that in addition to his revealing comments about coal, the source of nearly half of our electricity, he also states that he wants the cost of electricity to skyrocket. Taken together with his stated intention to move us away from gas and diesel and toward electricity to power our vehicles, it would appear that Obama's ultimate aim is to reduce our lifestyle to third-world conditions in some sort of quixotic quest for "fairness."

I wonder what Obama's fans will think of him then. It will be scant comfort to be able to tell them "I told you so!"